A point I've been trying to make. What are the expectations of "representation" in a genre that is, at its core, non-representational?
Since I'm white, I can't say for certain that Tony Stark whiteness plays no role in my identification. But I don't think it does; what I really want is that dang suit. And I think I'd "identify" with Iron Man the same way that I presently do (imagining flying around in an iron suit), just the same if someone of a different race manned it (or gender womaned it) in the comic or movies.
I think this is a useful comment because it raises the point about that while race plays a part in identification, it only plays a role
within the complicated ways people identify with characters.
I will point out there is probably a lot more you identify with Tony Stark then the suit though, because you chose Iron Man over say, War Machine, Iron Monger, Firepower, Dr. Doom, Norman Osborn...er, you get the point.
There is probably a great deal of character facets that go into these. Some of these are probably at least cultural and class oriented, only because those experience require a deal of distancing from ourselves, and greater mental strain to make those connections and identifications.
Now, what I take from all this is that racial features alone don't make a character identifiable. This history of comics characters is littered with minority characters that readers failed to identify with. I would say there's a good chance that there's something approaching rough parity of African-American heroes to white, on raw numbers, due to the numbers that are wheeled out and soon forgotten.
Now, on the other hand, there are certain characters that are famous for appealing to minorities (especially at launch) which strictly speaking were short on them. Spider-Man and the New X-men come to mind in this regard, and they, don't seem to cut the mustard anymore. So why?
One factor that's obvious and needs to get out of the way first, is obviously the standards have changed. As bad as media representations of minorities are, they are a lot, lot better than they were in the 1960s. We are very fortunate to the fact that Peter Parker said "Hey" to a black student one time no longer is a life altering experience to some readers.
The second though, has to do with Narrative content. The term that continues to be used in these discussions is "identification", and as we've discussed there's a lot that goes into these things. But I think the biggest is that they represent, at least symbolically, challenges and goals the reader understands and to some extent shares, but I think deeper than that, works in the context of a Metanarrative you share.
That is, the way their world works. Tony Stark works in a world you understand, and operates on the same lines of cause and effect, and the same idea of what life is about. There's a reason people identify with Tony Stark easily, and ROM much less so. They may like and prefer ROM, but very few people would say they identify strongly with ROM's experience.
This, I think is why X-Men went from being the poster comic for racial minorities to just another comic. This, for better or worse, I think is also linked to the Gay Rights movement, and how those experiences were understood. Starting with the New X-Men, the X-Men were a team of misfits and outsiders, but crucially, this was not due to some remarkable experience, like say, the Thing.
Instead, outsiders to society is what they WERE. There was an implicit and sometimes explicit understanding that these people had been isolated, marginalized and beat down all their lives. AND they acted and behaved in ways that reflected that experience. They didn't even long for or accept the possibility that they could EVER belong to society.
Now, fast forward to the 2010s, and the narrative of mutants is very different. The emphasis is now placed on the transformation most mutants undergo in puberty. X-Men 2 was particularly blunt about this parallel in the whole scene about "Have you ever tried not being a mutant?" scene.
This has had effects on the whole meta-narrative. The central injustice mutants face is that they were normal white middle class Americans, or act in accordance to the expectations of white middle class Americans, and are still excluded from a white middle class American lifestyle. The ideals the X-Men seem to fight for (OK, the X-Men lead by cyclops, because that needs to be specified with X-Men now) are not only the integration of mutants into society, but the integration of mutants into society on terms that preserve their openly mutant identity, which is something that would have just sounded bonkers to the New X-Men.
Which is all well and good. There's plenty of practical writing reasons and non-racial causes for the changes that happened, some of them good, a lot of them bad, I think (but that's because I'm a cynic about the Big 2). But it happened, and the meta-narrative doesn't fit anymore. Which is OK, because I don't think New X-Men's Meta-narrative fits the experience of many racial minorities in America perfectly anymore either.
But it does tell us that there's a lot more going on in the discussions than just the explicit race of the character. And while all this can get worked out from the experience of fictional minorities, if they can't write something that gels with the minority experience, they can't write something that gels with the minority experience. The success of X-Men and Spider-Man in the minority appeal was, by all accounts, a happy accident. Stan Lee and John Byrne were writing about what it was like being really
weird in America, which happened to look a lot like being a racial minority in America at the time. So,the take away is that comic books were never all that good at writing to minority experiences, but it is doable, and it can sell. The explicit demands of consumers makes it seem that it can sell better than ever.
